


destructions that are dear to me

by orbitalsquabbles



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Happy Ending, Harrow and Gideon deserve their chance to be the horrible teens, Pseudo-Modern AU, Self-Indulgent, Unreliable Narrator, purposefully undertagged for spoiler reasons - link to full warning list inside
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:54:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26474524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orbitalsquabbles/pseuds/orbitalsquabbles
Summary: Harrow could see through the open top the lurid, brightly-printed covers of cheap pulp magazines.CULT SECRETS: THE STRANGE REVENGE OF THE SCARLET BOUNTY HUNTERS!read the issue on the left.DOUBLE FEATURE TROUBLE!read the one on the right,THE HANDMAIDENS OF SUBTERRANEA! TERROR ON THE JOVIAN FRONTIER!It showed a malformed pterodactyl attacking a woman wearing what must have been a really large red sheet, set against the backdrop of a huge pile of jewels."Ugh," said Harrow, who had secretly been hoping the box contained a skeleton.Or: Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus grow up together in the shadow of the Ninth House cult.
Relationships: Gideon Nav & Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 66
Kudos: 142





	1. In which Gideon Nav refuses to dump pickle juice in a graveyard.

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve undertagged on purpose both because I want to avoid spoilers and because I don’t think anything in here is worse than canon in any way. If you read both books and didn’t have any trouble you should be fine here. This story should be tamer. For a full list of content warnings, go [HERE](https://orbitalsquabbles.tumblr.com/post/629296520999682048/in-general-this-fic-has-almost-all-the-same). I can promise a happy ending and a good dose of softness along the way but that doesn't mean there won't be freaky shit too.
> 
> If you didn't read both books I can't promise there won't be spoilers. Maybe put off reading until you're done with Harrow the Ninth.
> 
> Also, this is one of those fics that's weirdly American about non-American source content. This is because I am unfortunately also American and the initial idea was "Harrow and Gideon fuck around and find out in a landscape I'm really homesick about." If that kind of thing really bothers you then maybe give it a skip. You don't need to know things about, like, the American school system or anything specific like that.
> 
> * * *
> 
> _  
> After a good deal, after vague leagues,  
>  confused about domains, uncertain about territories,  
> accompanied by faint hopes  
> and faithless companies and uneasy dreams,  
> I love the tenacity that still survives in my eyes...  
> _

## PART ONE: SUMMER.

****

Drearburh suffered under the weight of August. The air buzzed, and the buzzing dragged the entire atmosphere lower and heavier and wetter. Through this morass the sun burned the thin, weak grass on the side of the little highway, the paint on the faded sign ("THE HOUSE OF THE NINTH - HOME OF THE LOCKED TOMB - EST. 8000 BR"), and the suspicious collection of freckles who was messing around at the base of the sign.

"Griddle! What are you _doing?"_ Harrowhark Nonagesimus called out of the edge of the trees. "You said yesterday you'd be over at ten!"

"Look!" her companion shouted back, gesturing at something that only someone standing next to her would have been able to see.

Harrow glanced at the sky, regretted it, blinked furiously, debated her course of action, and finally ran out of the cover of shade. She was eleven, and she had all the muscle tone of a starved bureaucrat, if a little less coordination. Because she had been in the woods, and because she did not believe in allowing insects liberties, she was covered from wrist to neck to ankle in cloth; because she _did_ believe in the color black, none of her clothing was summer-appropriate. As someone who never intentionally exposed herself to it, Harrowhark had a natural distrust of the sun, and suspected that it would quickly burn her given any opportunity. For this reason she often wore a hood and veil when outdoors. She would also sprint across any opening in the tree cover, or try to, and achieve a rapid scuttle instead. She looked like an escapee from a prison for vampires.

Gideon was there to greet her with a huge grin as she slid to a stop. Her stupid-looking glasses, which were entirely too big, had slid down her nose to expose her livewire eyes. "Look!" she said, and pointed down into the grass.

There was a cardboard box there, damp but not soaked through. Harrow could see through the open top the lurid, brightly-printed covers of cheap pulp magazines. _CULT SECRETS: THE STRANGE REVENGE OF THE SCARLET BOUNTY HUNTERS!_ read the issue on the left. _DOUBLE FEATURE TROUBLE!_ read the one on the right, _THE HANDMAIDENS OF SUBTERRANEA! TERROR ON THE JOVIAN FRONTIER!_ It showed a malformed pterodactyl attacking a woman wearing what must have been a really large red sheet, set against the backdrop of a huge pile of jewels.

"Ugh," said Harrow, who had secretly been hoping the box contained a skeleton.

"Oh, just because it's not a dead body," said Gideon, making her flush darkly and look away. Thankfully, Gideon herself had her nose buried in a third issue _(ARCHSECRETS! DRAGON-CAVALIERS OF THE WASTES!)_ and did not see this. "This one has sorcerers in it, and an underwater cave with a _skull whale!"_

Harrow didn't know what a skull whale was, but she knew exactly what the burning feeling on the nape of her neck meant.. She reached over and snatched the magazine out of Gideon's loose grip.

"Hey!" Gideon said, suddenly awakened from her reverie.

"Grab the box and come on!" Harrow snapped, and took off for the treeline. Gideon caught her up before she was halfway there. Her huge green t-shirt flapped wildly around where she clutched her morning's take to her chest.

"Look," Gideon said. She knew that they had had other plans for the day, and Harrow knew that she knew. It was time to wheedle. "Aren't you sick of me interrupting you when you have to study your weird dusty secret books? Today you can tell me to shut up and sit down and read. Today only. Take it or leave it!" Her voice rang with all the authority of the extra year-and-change she had on Harrow.

Harrow had to admit, silently, only herself, that she would take it. But that didn't mean she wouldn't make Griddle pay for it. She deepened her scowl and stomped her feet harder down the path they'd worn through the weeds. "So what? You want to read today?" She said _read_ like Gideon might have said it, or like Crux might have said anything directed at Gideon. "No graveyard?"

Gideon wavered as she watched. Harrow could see how much she wanted to go to the graveyard. But then her face smoothed out, back into its stupid cocky grin. "No graveyard," she said, nonchalant. "Congrats, dark lady! It's book day."

Suspicion rose in Harrow like marshwater. But she had to be satisfied with that.

They broke back out onto grass. Rather than cross her yard, Harrow tagged along the thin rim of shadow by the trees, working her way around. Gideon kept pace beside her. The sun caught in her unkept hair, creating a nimbus around her head. Somewhere nearby a bird squalled and its neighbor squalled back. They were warm and happy in the way of children in summer, with no obligations and a great deal of trouble to get into.

The yard was much greener than the side of the highway had been. This was first and foremost due to the sprinkler that someone had dutifully set out in the center, although Harrow knew from dreadful experience that Crux, the caretaker, would come around the sides and water all the grass in such a way that would easily lead to him soaking any secret visitors hiding in plant cover. This would lead to one of his classic screaming matches with Gideon. She did her best to avert these, but when her best friend was someone who liked to be difficult for fun, it made things hard.

Across the yard and to the left of where they came out of the woods was a huge mound of stone. To the right was an enormous heap of a house, with towers that didn’t match the turrets and turrets that didn’t match the towers and windows that didn’t match anything at all. The roof was copper that had greened over under the weight of time until it was the same black as the paint on the walls. The wooden trim (of which there was a great deal) had been worked into the symbols of her parents and her parents’ parents and their charge until the end of time: the cranium and the boulder. Or, as Gideon put it, the million different creepy skulls and the million identical boring circles. All of it was painted stark white. Harrow could hear, on the opposite side of the house, Crux working on repainting some of it. He was whistling one of their old songs: _we pray for the tomb/at the dark of the moon/in the absence of sun…_

They ducked inside. All light vanished.

The Ninth House was sepulchrally cool and dark. It was an eternal relief to Harrow. Gideon muttered something under her breath and unwillingly took off her sunglasses. They had come in through the second kitchen, which was too dilapidated to bother using now that there weren’t so many nuns to feed. If they had had to go through the rest of the house, they would undoubtedly have run into some unpleasant character to eject Gideon and exhort Harrow not to listen to the riffraff - one of Harrow’s own great-aunts, for instance, since it was August and they had no other youth to torment - but Harrow had long since tracked down where all the secret passages were. In no time they had pried the ebony wainscoting open into the door it was, closed it behind them, and slipped up three flights of stairs.

These were the family rooms (a misnomer; Harrow lived there by herself). As they passed through the door into the library and shut it behind themselves, they both breathed a little sigh of relief. None of the penitents would disturb them there. They could talk without worrying about being overheard, at least until Crux came inside.

“What a find!” Gideon said smugly. She dumped the box on a rickety table and ripped the top open a little more. “Just sitting there, on the side of the road. Why would anyone throw away-” she picked up the next issue- _”SOLAR TIGERS OF THE OPIOJUNGLE?”_

“One wonders,” Harrow said in her driest voice. She was settling into the thin, high-backed armchair she usually read in. If she was going to get extra study time, she wasn’t about to waste it. Off of the teetering pile of books next to her she picked _Excen’s Principles of Collegiate Katabasis._

It was a very pleasant early afternoon - the kind where, if they didn’t have something demanding their attention, the two of them could easily have fallen asleep side by side on the faded carpet. The sun trickled in minutely through one of the windows. Far off, Crux had stopped whistling and started muttering, but this was a nostalgic sound for Harrow, who had never been without it. The insects in the trees were droning at each other; there was a single cicada directly outside the window shouting at the top of its lungs. Every so often, Gideon would say something like “wow! Cannibalism! Freaky!” or “oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.”

Harrow ignored her comfortably for three or four hours, until Gideon had flopped onto her back and opened her tenth magazine above her head like a tent. Then she slid out of the chair.

“Now,” she announced, wicked with glee, “we are going to the graveyard.”

* * *

Gideon had protested, of course.

“It’s close to dinner,” she complained. And then, “by the time we’re ready to go, with our provisions and everything-” there had apparently been a lot of adventures involving provisions in the pulp she’d found- “it’ll almost be dusk.”

Harrow had considered this. “If I let you get food, will you fake decency and shut up?”

Thirty minutes later they were pushing Harrow’s too-big bike down the road. Gideon could ride it, and Harrow could cling to her back, which worked for them. Harrow had on her own back a little black backpack, which they had filled with a jar of pickles, a peanut butter sandwich, and a banana (for Gideon); a tube of saltless wafers (for Harrow); and a thermos of water (for both of them).

There are a lot of very interesting things that children can get up to with little adult supervision and the run of their surroundings. Harrow and Gideon’s activity of choice was exploring, because Gideon had no interest in magic rituals (Harrow’s favorite) and Harrow had no interest in having sword fights with fallen branches (Gideon’s favorite). By mutual agreement, the area between Ninth House and the gray orphanage where Gideon lived was boring and over-explored. Harrow had a map of the county hidden back in the library, and they had marked out where they already knew. Since starting their official record, they had explored a large section of fields (boring - went very fast), the woods behind Ninth House (initially interesting, but after a while, just more of the same), the town park (not bad, lots of flowers in spring), and the creek that went through the town park (excellent - you could go into the storm drain at one end, and Gideon had once startled a young nun into screaming by catching her eye and grinning horribly at her from underneath the street).

Now they came to the graveyard. It was on the opposite side of the town park, which, Harrow said, hadn’t been built on because the creek made it too swampy. At one edge, however, it rose into a hill. The side of the hill was covered in brambles and completely impassable to them. But at the top was the quiet graveyard on its quiet road. This, they had agreed, should be explored before they moved on.

Dusk was drawing itself in as the two of them pushed the bike up the hill. The cicadas had multiplied, and the crickets joined in, and the other insects they didn’t know, creating a deafening conversation. Fireflies began to pop in and out of view. The leaves of the bushes along the road waved gently in the wind, which was pulling the smell of honeysuckle down the hill. Above them rose the cathedral of trees that surrounded Drearburh. Harrow pointed out a black squirrel with understated enthusiasm, which didn’t fool Gideon at all.

At the top was the graveyard.

By mutual mental agreement, Harrow and Gideon both kept their mouths shut at first. It was impossible not to feel night coming close with all its dignity, or the weight of the honeysuckle, which had overtaken nearly every other plant in the graveyard. Even the air stilled. For a few minutes the two of them passed silently through the stones.

But there wasn’t any fear in the graveyard. Wherever the dead were, Harrow felt, they weren’t there - perhaps a summer evening didn’t matter as much to them. In the fading light she read one tombstone, then another.

“Here’s a Nav,” she said at last. “Ananet Nav.”

“Look at that rock,” Gideon said. Her voice always gave everything away, every ounce of feeling. Sometimes it felt like Harrow was prying just by listening, and that she would have to slap her hands over her ears the way she did when trucks drove by. “It’s a hundred years old! That’s not my mom.”

“Obviously not,” said Harrow. She moved on.

Their voices had broken the spell. There was no one around - if Gideon wanted to whoop while she tried to turn a handstand, that was her business. Harrow kept looking at monuments. The stone carved in so many shapes - the urn; the cranium, for penitents; the perfect orb of the rock that lay in the entrance to the Tomb, for nuns. These repeated over and over again. A few people had something different. One grave, towards the very back, had a worn-down statue of someone with a sword in their hand. Another grave from just a few decades ago had the likeness of a large bird perched on the stone. A third was just a stark-looking black obelisk, which read on the side, _”AD IUSTITIAM.”_

“Harrowhark!” Gideon shouted at her, wheeling their transportation closer. She had slung the backpack over the bike, and it lay by the seat, where the pedals disturbed it every few seconds. “You forgot to eat again!”

“No, I did not,” Harrow said in her most severe voice, which was ruined by the fact that she was eleven years old. “I meant to eat in a few minutes.”

“Now,” insisted Gideon, who was hungry herself.

They sat down on the grass in the aisle of free space that led down the center of the graveyard. The insects were still carrying on. The breeze was starting to pick up again. The sun was working at the horizon. Gideon crammed into her mouth half the sandwich almost in one go.

“That’s disgusting, Griddle,” Harrow said, eating a wafer cracker with the delicate frustration of someone dramatic set to a menial chore. Gideon pushed the rest of the sandwich into her mouth in response.

After the sandwich Gideon attacked the pickles. This was a blessing to Harrow, since the weight of the bottle had chipped away at her shoulders the entire way there. She ate half the jar, crunching enthusiastically, smart enough not to offer Harrow any. Then she made to put the lid back on.

Harrow reached out to stop her. “No - we’re going to pour out half of the brine.”

Gideon gave her the kind of look usually reserved for particularly slow criminals. “I’m not dumping half a jar of pickle juice in a graveyard.”

“They don’t care!” insisted Harrow. “Look at them!” (The graveyard was the picture of peace - a sparrow had lit on a tomb not twenty feet away from them. It looked like it was about to appear in a children's movie.) “Just pour it out, Griddle, it’s heavy.”

“I say again,” said Gideon again, “I’m not dumping half a jar of pickle juice in a goddamn _graveyard._ I’m not tempting fate with something as stupid as that.”

“None of them are even recent dead!” cried Harrow. (“I know,” Gideon said gloomily, “nothing _ever_ happens here.”) “They’ll probably be happy to be able to taste something strong-flavored.”

“Wait, is _that_ what your creepy nun club teaches about the afterlife? That the dead hang around tasting whatever’s in their mouth? The dirt or whatever?”

“Why the fuck,” asked Harrow, suddenly and inexplicably frustrated, wishing she could reach out and hit Gideon, throw herself at her, “would they teach us that?”

Gideon’s eyes had widened when she swore. Every time she did - and it was rare and far between - Harrow felt unsettled and stupidly guilty, as if some unnoticed adult would chime in and scold her. But it was worth it to scare Gideon, who seemed to feel the same thing but much more strongly.

This let her steal the pickle jar.

"Hey!" Griddle shouted, and threw herself halfway into Harrow's lap. The wafers tumbled acrobatically end over end into the dirt. Her hand almost missed the jar, but not quite. It fell out of Harrow's hand and lurched onto its side. Three pickles and a great flood of brine emerged.

"Oh," said Gideon. Her hand was still raised by Harrow's chin. It was too tempting. She leaned out and bit.

Gideon bellowed and elbowed her, and then they were rolling in the grass, squalling at each other like a pair of furious birds. Harrow dug her nails into Gideon's shoulder and bit again, thumping her head against her foe's. She only knew how to fight dirty, and in front of Gideon had sworn an oath on the skeleton of a cow that she would never fight any other way. But even if Gideon hadn't been older, she would have been stronger and bigger. The fight quickly turned her way, until, with a sound like a dead slug, she pulled back.

"Yecch!" she said again, pawing at her ear.

Harrow looked at her in total blankness for a moment. It looked as though _Gideon_ had given up on rubbing her face in the dirt just because of an itch.

Just then a huge drop of water landed on her tights, right over her knee, making her jump and grimace. She looked up and saw towering clouds, so gray they were almost green; clouds in a sky with neither sun nor mercy. The wind tormented the leaves of the graveyard. 

The graveyard, incidentally, had little cover. This was a good thing: it made Harrow's choice much easier. "Get the bike!" she ordered, and even though Gideon yelled, "ugh- no, Harrow, come on, that's so _creepy!"_ she obeyed.

In the whole graveyard, there was only one mausoleum. It was a small affair, because the graveyard was small, but beautifully made. The corners were carved into delicate arabesques with roses worked in. Around the door was a decorated arch of stone, which said DO NOT MISTAKE THE THAW FOR THE SPRING in curvilinear letters from the ground on one side to the ground on the other. Above this arch, at the base of the roof, was a stone nameplate, and this read:

SEPTIMUS.

Harrow had the door open by the time that Gideon had wrestled the bike back onto its wheels and dragged it over. The sky was a dark gray, now. The storm was just making its mind up about arriving.

"In a fucking tomb?" Gideon asked desperately.

But there was nothing there. It was only a stone shell. Nothing had ever been buried here - the floor was clean, perfectly clean, and flat, without even a pedestal for a coffin. The only thing wrong with it was that, being a closed building in the middle of August, it was extremely stuffy.

"Oh," said Harrow, secretly relieved.

They sat down on the floor just inside the door. The bike, abandoned again, lay behind them. The last of the light was going, swallowed early by the weather, but after this revelation the graveyard seemed even more innocuous than before. No ghosts were there. Only two children with grass-stained clothes and a few new scrapes.

"They won't catch you, right?" Harrow asked.

"Nah," Gideon said. "They only do rollcall in the mornings."

The storm passed by quickly- August through and through. It piled on the rain gleefully, went too hard too fast, and had to leave in disgrace. What sounded like a hundred thousand birds had turned out to shout about it to each other, and the insects in turn were trying to drown out the birds. Gideon and Harrow waited it out, elbow to elbow, in silence. Then, the last of the sunset peeking through in the west, they left for home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit, 12/6/20: Since starting this fic right after HtN's release, I've come to realize that Harrow is meant to be mixed Maori, and I had initially written her as the kind of white that goes lobster red if there is a single ray of sunlight shining in the same hemisphere. I THINK I have caught all such references and changed them, but if you find one, please point it out to me so I can get it too. (I have left Harrow in this chapter believing that she will get sunburnt very easily; this is both for comedic effect and to demonstrate her suspicion and mistrust.)


	2. In which Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus each say the word "condom."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _...I hear in my heart my horseman steps,  
>  I bite the dormant fire and the ruined salt,  
> and at night, dark in atmosphere and fugitive mourning,  
> he who keeps vigil at the edge of camps,  
> the armed traveler of sterile resistances,  
> prisoner amid growing shadows and trembling wings,  
> I feel that I am he, and my arm of stone defends me...  
> _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Timeskip! Gideon is now fourteen. Harrow is now thirteen.

## PART TWO: FALL.

September was a traitor month if you asked Gideon Nav. It was still summer, humidity and all. Now that she was a teen and everything she was sweating like Ortus did every time someone asked him about sports, and every time she sweated, she _stunk._ This in particular seemed like a lot to deal with for the rest of her mortal lifetime. Harrow had actually barricaded her inside a bathroom the other day, somehow, until she gave in and showered.

September, of course, also featured School. And if there was anything worse than sweating through her own shirt while messing around in the woods, it was sweating through a faded black uniform in a building with no real AC and a nun breathing down her neck.

Drearburh was a little stain of a town, run by a stain of a cult, and all Drearburh's little parts had taken their cue from the larger whole. The school had some official name, because it was theoretically a public school, but it was really Drearburh Parochial and all the teachers were really Ninth House nuns. Every morning the kids trickled in through the front door, sat down in their classrooms, and, when the creaky, unintelligible loudspeakers played the sound of the cult's stupid bell, rose as one to intone: _I pray the tomb is shut forever… I pray the rock is never rolled away…_

There was some weak agreement among the Locked Tomb that making someone join in who was so ungrateful as to not believe dampened the effect of the prayer. Gideon took full advantage of this and played it right to the hilt every chance she got. She'd tilt her dusty blue plastic chair back on its hind legs and sit cross legged with her knees propped up on top of her desk in the most disrespectful way she could. She'd mouth along to the prayer and replace its most modular words. _I spray the tomb that's shut with whatever… I'm gay and rock your mom all day…_

Then all the cult kids would sit down to paint themselves. Gideon would become the only bare-faced normie in a sea of fake skulls.

Of course, now that she was fourteen, things were going to be a little different, she thought to herself as she trudged over on that first day. This was her first year in the older part of school - a whole separate building! - and _something_ would be different.

As it turned out, the uniform was the same. The pledge was the same. The face paint was the same. Even the kids were the same. She'd somehow forgotten that they were all from the same tiny place and would only be rid of each other in death. The thing that was different was Gideon.

"What are YOU doing here?" she blurted, standing in the front office. Her uniform shirt was ripped. Her nose was bloodied and there was a cut in her eyebrow. Her hands were cuffed behind her back and held there by a pissed-off Crux. Worst of all, Harrowhark Nonagesimus was sitting behind the desk in front of her.

"If all I do is test out of classes, there's no point in my attending them," Harrow said. Her pointy little face held whole planets' worth of superiority, and Gideon swore she had to be sitting on a phonebook. Recently, she had realized she knew how to raise one eyebrow, and that Gideon couldn't, and she showed that off now. "Yourself?"

"The miscreant wronged this school. She vandalized its property. She-" Crux gave her shoulder a nasty little shake- "engaged in vulgarity and corrupted her classmates."

"Sister Glaurica was pretending to teach us sex ed and I told some guy what a condom was," Gideon supplied helpfully.

She was doing her best to hold back her glee. Crux loved Harrow with all the stupid devotion of a lifelong Locked Tomb guy, all gravedust and certainty that she would lead the cult through their next ninety years of holding back the apocalypse. Or whatever it was they were supposed to be doing. And Harrow might have been her friend, but she really was the embodiment of the Ninth House, and that meant that usually if there was someone else around she was a raging bitch.

In this case, though, she was a raging bitch who had had Sister Glaurica teaching her class the same curriculum two weeks ago. And the moment Crux shook Gideon's shoulder, her eyes had narrowed just a little.

"Just leave her here," Harrow said. The sudden exhaustion in her voice was real, and it took all the humor out of the moment very suddenly for Gideon, even though she had no idea what had caused it (other than staying up until 1 AM every night researching dark forces) or how to fix it (probably something only the dark forces could do). "She's caused enough trouble. I remember seeing alternate disciplinary options in her file."

"Reverend Daughter," Crux croaked willingly. He left, closing the door behind him.

"I suppose now I'll have to go digging for your paperwork," Harrow said snidely, and then his footsteps passed the window made of ancient, thick blocks of glass, receding down the hall. She jumped to her feet and grabbed Gideon, all but dragging her into the tiny cubby of a nurse's office despite her complaints.

"What happened?" Harrow hissed. She had already started digging through Glaurica's medical supplies, some of which could have come from ancient Greece or Rome if you judged by the way they were crumbling. "You didn't injure your face like that by talking about condoms!"

Gideon appreciated, really _savored,_ the way that Harrow had to force herself to say 'condoms' when she didn't have to work at all to say horrible things like 'chondrosarcoma of the axial skeleton.' She was blushing a little just at having to acknowledge their existence. "Well, you know. Crux might not have appreciated my backtalk."

"So he slammed your head into a desk," Harrow said. She had managed to come up with a container of rubbing alcohol, a sad little tube of ointment, an even sadder packet of tissues, and a bandaid.

"Yep," Gideon said, popping the _p._ "Pretty much. Do you want to take these handcuffs off, by the way?"

"No," Harrow said curtly. "Stay here." And she went back out to the office, slamming the door behind her.

Gideon experienced one long, slow, horrible moment of being a teenager, where some deeply stupid part of her- the same part that had noticed breasts on a classmate, the same part that had lingered over a couple magazine pages describing cruel women tying up less-cruel women in torn clothing- went, _oh? Going to keep me in these?_ And then she physically cringed. When that wasn't enough, she shook her head like a dog, and when that wasn't enough either she finally started jumping painfully up and down to distract herself.

"What are you _doing?"_ Harrow demanded from the doorway.

"Nothing," Gideon growled, turning away from her to display her hands. "Come on, get these off, would you?"

Wonder of wonders, Harrow actually complied. When Gideon turned back around, gingerly stretching her arms and massaging her wrists, she was holding a steel key.

"We have a copy," said Harrow with all the brusque nastiness that made her herself. If that tone of voice made any part of Gideon happy, well, no one else had to know. "Now sit down. I need to patch you up before Aiglamene gets here."

This worked like nothing else would have. Neither of them would have admitted it, but they both knew Gideon worshipped the ground Aiglamene walked on. Ortus's dad might have been king of the jocks or whatever back in his day, might have been high up in the Tomb, but Aiglamene was the one who could have killed someone with her bare hands. Even now, pushing eighty with a mangled leg, Gideon thought she was the most competent person in town. She was for sure the only person left who actually knew anything about fighting. So Gideon sat down on the shitty fold-out chair to be cleaned up, and Harrow hoisted herself onto the desk and daubed away the blood and got alcohol into her eyebrow cut.

"I don't want the ointment," Gideon protested. "I want a cool scar."

Harrow didn't care and applied it anyway. "What you want is an infection, Griddle, you idiot. You'll look very _cool_ with your eyebrow rotting off your face."

When they were done, Harrow sat back down on her phonebook behind the desk and Gideon slumped into one of the dated, hideously uncomfortable chairs that lined the front office. The cult had painted the wood on them a stark white, probably out of disappointment that they couldn't actually make them out of human bone. The only surviving fluorescent light shone down on the two of them. Harrow rustled her papers productively. Gideon experimented with how far forward on the industrial carpet she could plant her feet without the rest of her falling out of her slump and onto the floor. She was hideously bored.

"Hey, shadow priestess," she said idly.

"What?" Harrow asked in her bitchy little voice.

"Can I come over after school?"

Harrow put her papers down. She covered her eyes with her hands. The seconds stretched out uncomfortably.

"Yes," she said eventually. Her voice was brittle. "Fine. Why not?"

Gideon still didn't know how to handle this kind of Harrow, who hadn't existed last year. Her current tactic was to pretend it wasn't happening and try to distract her.

"Because I was thinking," she said. "As long as you're reluctant because of your allergy to fun, and not because there's going to be some kind of cult function in your house. We should talk about what we're doing for your birthday."

"Griddle, the state of your mind alarms me daily. My birthday is almost two months away," Harrow said.

By saying this bit of nonsense to her, Gideon had restored a little lemon to her voice. She stretched out her toes inside her shoes in secret victory. "Yeah, but I know you hate how everyone is the whole month. I thought maybe we'd give you a little something else to look forward to. Maybe a graveyard crime a week? Maybe a little... tomb raiding?"

When Gideon said _tomb raiding,_ Harrow sat back and looked at her. Her face paint was perfect. It hadn't smudged at all, even where she'd pressed her hands into her eye sockets, all the little suggestions of bone and shadow intact. Her eyes were perfectly black, the way a Locked Tomb girl's should be. She had no expression. Gideon felt that if, in that moment, she _had_ grown a second head, Harrow might've felt reassured.

Aiglamene opened the door and limped in. Harrow turned to her, very naturally, very unnaturally, and said, "we have an ingrate for you."

"Is that so," said Aiglamene.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic was originally going to be posted in five chapters of one season each. However, each chapter was taking quite a while to write, and I need that sweet, sweet dopamine. So I'm breaking up the original, longer sections into smaller chapters and posting them as soon as they're finalized! This also lets me make jokes in chapter titles.
> 
> The current total of 20 chapters is an estimate, it could change in the future depending on how I break up the greater whole. But effectively the length of the fic hasn't changed at all.
> 
> Also, let me know if you have any modern-ey, adolescent-related things you'd particularly like to see. I still have some unplanned space in part 3...
> 
> Edit: also how do u get into the discord... inquiring minds want to know...


	3. In which Gideon Nav almost, but not quite, freaks the fuck out.

Gideon knew that she had experienced that whole afternoon, but afterwards, it felt like a long series of images. She'd been too happy and it shorted something out. There she was running around the building while Aiglamene judged her endurance - then her form at push-ups - pull-ups - crunches - squats - burpees. She was clambering from one set of rundown playground equipment to the other and back as fast as she could go, secretly proud of always having slaughtered at tag or mulch. She was skinning her way up a rope, trying to pull a splinter out with her teeth at the bottom, having Aiglamene smack her hand away from her mouth and fish it out with tweezers. Aiglamene forced her to drink a bottle of water instead of the Hug she'd snuck out of the back of the cafeteria earlier. Aiglamene glowered at her lunch, such as it was, and made dire predictions about her future. Aiglamene took her into the basement of the school, which was basically a catacomb anyway, full of dust and ancient mouldering boxes, and had her dig around in the dark.

Aiglamene had her pick out - oh, oh, oh, oh, oh - Aiglamene had her pick out a _sword._

It was very plain. It had been sitting in a box in the bottom of Drearburh Parochial for probably a hundred years. It was almost as tall as she was, taller than Harrow had ever been in her life. It was Gideon’s.

“You’ll compete when you’re ready,” said the ancient and horrifically scarred swordmaster, “and not before.”

It was dark by the time she left the school after, probably, the best day of her life. There had been no further class. She’d escaped the pre-lunch prayer, the post-lunch prayer, the thirty-five minutes she’d been assigned to group prayer, and the ritual end-of-day recitation of prayer. A nun had given her a visibly wide berth in the hall because of how bad she smelled. She had been ordered to spend at least an hour polishing the sword that night, and it was a beautiful night. Gideon tried and failed to whistle, then gave it up as a waste of energy as she trudged down the street away from the malevolent bulk of the school. She was so tired that as she walked all her muscles felt like they were going backwards.

The breeze was pleasantly cool on her forehead. Clouds scuttled across the sky. Drearburh was silent - at this hour all the penitents and nuns and Cruxes were on their knees at home, praying their knucklebones.

Gideon thought about knucklebones and stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. “Oh, shit,” she said.

Harrow was a horrible little fiend who liked being alone in her family library, which was full of human bones. Her parents lived an equally solitary life one floor up in their vows of silence. Crux took them up food every day and once a week Harrow went in for an hour, and other than that, they had no contact with the outside world. It was probably inherited, the same way Harrow had inherited her Ninth House looks and being a huge fucking goth. Maybe she wouldn’t want anyone to come by her house two hours after the sun went down even if they’d talked about it earlier. Maybe she’d rather have her privacy.

But the look on her face earlier stuck in Gideon’s head like protein gruel in her throat. It had been a normal expression. It had given her an incredible feeling of unease - even if she had no idea what she was uneasy about.

Resigned to her fate of being heckled for stopping by, or worse, caught by some non-Harrow tomb personnel, Gideon turned around and backtracked two blocks, then hung a right. Out of habit she searched the sky as she did. The moon was nowhere to be found. Crux would have a harder time seeing her if she did try to sneak in, but that didn’t mean much. The Locked Tomb apparently frowned on the use of too much power after dark. Everyone in Drearburh had good night vision.

She got to the house. She put her left foot onto the grass. She stopped.

It was the same kind of stop an animal would make because it saw something really big and horrible and nasty and its hindbrain kicked in and said, if you don’t move, maybe it won’t see you. If you move you’re fucked but maybe if you don’t you can go on living. Gideon had never stopped like that in her life, and now that she had, she couldn’t convince her feet to move. Something terrible was here.

The bulk of the tomb - the tomb, the Locked Tomb - stood surrounded by the dark to her right. Gideon had never been impressed by the tomb. It was just a really big rocky hill with another rock in front of it, and yeah, that was a _little_ weird to have in your yard. Gideon just didn’t think it was cult-worthy. It was the kind of rock pile that deserved a sign by the highway that said, _The LOCKED TOMB! Where The Apocalypse Lies Sleeping! Five Miles Exit 37B!_ and a ten foot long arrow underneath to show what side of the road it was on. Harrow’s horrible aunts should have been running a merchandise shop full of cheap t-shirts and constantly freaking out road-trippers instead of local kids.

Right then, with no moon, no light at all, no wind, no other sound, a hideous thought came to Gideon. What if Harrow was right?

What if there was something in there? Something that - and Gideon remembered all the crap she’d been fed as a child - _could_ roll away the rock. It just didn’t. Because it was sleeping. Everyone in the whole town except Gideon spent all their spare time praying that it kept on doing that.

It was the same stupid kind of feeling she’d had earlier in the office. There was nothing to make her think anything was wrong. It was just a feeling.

Gideon drew the sword without letting herself have any more feelings.

She became suddenly, intimately, stupidly aware that, actually, there _was_ sound. Crux was whistling inside the house. He sounded like someone had taken the end of a harmonica, put a red-hot poker through it, let it rust out for a decade, and then tried to play it.

“For fuck’s sake,” said Gideon under her breath. All at once she felt herself get her shit together. It was Drearburh. Drearburh was dark and quiet. There was a big pile of rocks in it that everybody in town worshipped because some of Harrow’s ancestors had been even more horrible than she was. She was standing in Harrow’s yard with a sword drawn. And the idea that the apocalypse was going to hoist up the rock and come out to kill her while Crux was whistling was so obscenely ridiculous that if it had happened she would have laid down and thrown a tantrum right there on the grass. She would have screamed and yelled and whined like Sister Glaurica, rolling on the lawn, until Harrow came out of the house and banished Crux and the apocalypse both using whatever fake fucked up death theorems she'd been fed since birth. It was just a night, a night in September when no one else was walking around and the wind was getting the first hints of coolness to suggest that maybe it would actually be fall soon, and she should probably sheathe her sword.

Gideon did sheathe her sword. She tiptoed over the porch the same way she’d done a thousand times and let herself in. Crux was still in the kitchen, and as usual he’d left his wallet in the basin the Ninth devotees used for their effects. She stole a bill out of it for the comfort of a familiar action. Then she opened the secret passage and crept up the stairs.

At the top she knocked. “Come,” said Harrow.

“It’s me!” Gideon said cheerfully, pushing into the room. She’d already forgotten being outside. Harrow’s little reading lamps were on, and Harrow herself was in her armchair hunched over a book almost as thick as her head. There was a box of her magazines on the floor and a half-eaten bowl of porridge on the table and a human skull on every bookshelf. The feeling of being in a room where she’d spent half her childhood settled over her. Without really realizing it she let out a little relieved breath.

“You have a _sword?”_ Harrow demanded.

“Yeah, look!” Gideon said. She drew it again and dropped the scabbard so she could show it off with both hands, holding it so the half-cleaned metal shone unevenly in the warm light. “Aiglamene gave it to me.”

Harrow gave her a significant look. Gideon gave her a significant look right back.

There was a note of triumph in her voice when Harrow said, “Ortus is going to cry.”

“I’m going to _make_ him cry!” said Gideon. “And his mom, too!” (Just because Ortus being cavalier primary was really embarrassing did not mean Gideon had managed to not be jealous. If Gideon had had to swear her allegiance publicly to someone who was only ten and who constantly rode around on the back of someone else’s bicycle, she would have turned herself inside out from shame. But Ortus had been encouraged to spend his time running around and lifting weights and dueling other people for his entire life, and Gideon had only started getting positive reinforcement that morning.)

"Aiglamene's training you? When will you compete?"

"She said 'when I'm ready,'" Gideon said, "so, judging from the last time I went to one, like next week." (The Ninth House cavalier tournaments were usually pretty sad affairs.)

"They use rapiers, though. Not that huge thing."

Harrow was talking about her sword, and it was true. Any of the kids competing to be ranked Locked Tomb cavs would have used a smaller sword in one hand, and Gideon already knew the huge sword she had required two. She had already fantasized (while daydreaming of fighting an unending flood of skeletons) about grabbing the top part of the hilt with her other hand and using it to batter in white, grinning skulls with clacking jaws that looked just like the ones in all the paintings downstairs. That kind of move would never fly in a tournament. The rules were too impractical to acknowledge how extremely cool it would be. But for some reason this just did not matter to her. Gideon knew- her whole body knew- that this two-hander was her sword, and that she was meant to have it, and also that she wouldn't be competing in tournaments with it, but that she would win anyway.

She shrugged. "We'll see."

They left it at that. Gideon, having suffered through only one hour and thirty-seven minutes of the new school year, had received no homework. Harrow, whose school year apparently involved running the school, didn't bother to pull any out. Instead Gideon slumped on the floor and polished her sword. Harrow continued to read. Every so often she would murmur something Gideon just couldn't comprehend, things like "the lipid-cranial interactions…" or "she was using blood theory to create oneirotrophic walls…." The kind of batshit stuff that her best friend was all about. Outside the last of the cicadas was whirring away. Crux had finally stopped whistling. The box of protein slurries that Harrow kept up here was better, under these conditions, than any nun-cooked orphanage meal.

"Anyway," Gideon said eventually, picking up their discussion from hours earlier, "what _do_ you want to do for your birthday?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who commented on the last chapter! I got a lot of really nice ones, it was wonderful.


	4. In which Gideon Nav joins the tiny house movement.

Harrow's birthday was probably the funniest joke the world had ever played on anyone. It was Halloween.

Halloween was the king of holidays to Gideon Nav. It involved wearing a costume (until now, the only way she could get away with swords); sprinting around after dark and scaring the shit out of monks; and collecting huge amounts of candy. This was one of the few sources of joy the Ninth House couldn't drum out of its devotees. The other kids liked Halloween just as much as her.

Unfortunately for Harrowhark, she'd never been just one of the other kids. Her parents had gotten to her early and well. Apparently it was against Ninth House doctrine to enjoy your own birthday.

(Harrow had tried to explain to her a couple of times the theological basis for her hatred of Halloween. All Gideon could say she'd gotten out of it was that Harrow didn't like the idea of spirits roaming around Drearburh for a night when she'd dedicated her whole life to keeping some kind of spirit out of it. Those lectures were eight or nine hours of her life she'd never get back.)

Now that she was fourteen, and really too old to go around with the other orphans to trick-or-treat, Gideon felt she should make October a little more bearable for Harrow. It sucked not celebrating your birthday. It probably sucked even more having a whole month of buildup to something you hated. So maybe this year it could be a little different for her.

Knowing Harrow, this meant they'd be doing some kind of extremely fucking creepy ritual in the middle of the night. But none of Harrow's rituals had turned out too bad before. Gideon could grin and bear it for her birthday. Eye of newt, hanged man's hand, or whatever.

Her mood only rose higher for the next several weeks. Aiglamene had decided to take her on as some kind of apprentice, so Gideon was free of Drearburh Parochial... forever. Forever!!! She'd never have to listen to another history lecture about whatever God did ten thousand years ago. 

The heat left over from August had finally cleared out. She was still sweating way too much, but now it was from weightlifting and sword drills, and she was sort of getting used to it. Money pilfered from Crux (as virtually all her money was) had got her deodorant; Harrow's pinched looks had got her showering more frequently. Aiglamene wouldn't let her learn to duel with the rapier until she was competent with the two-hander, but Gideon _loved_ the two-hander. Every chance she got she had it in her grip. Already her shoulders were broadening and her arms were getting bigger. There was nothing better in the world than learning the right way to swing an enormous fucking sword.

Harrow was thriving too. So far her role in the Ninth had been to relay her parents' instructions, deliver sermons, and get familiar with everything. Now she was being asked to run things herself. Gideon knew - not that she'd ever say it, but she knew - that Harrow was a terrible little control freak who liked to be in charge of everything she possibly could. Having cult nobodies defer to her must have gotten old years ago. Being school principal, though? Classic Nonagesimus power trip. In one move she'd put herself over every single person in their whole generation except Gideon. Gideon had actually stopped hearing people talking about "the Reverend Mother" this, "the Reverend Father" that. Drearburh was now a Reverend Daughter kind of town. She had to be having a fantastic fall.

One warm, sunny Saturday at the end of September, in a reversal of their usual habit, Harrow came to see Gideon.

It was early in the morning, probably seven. The nuns woke all the kids up each morning for dawn prayers about the Locked Tomb before their traditional holy breakfast of gruel and leeks. Gideon hated leeks (she had gotten out of eating them as a child by throwing up whenever she did, which was only a little bit on purpose). Lucky for her, she'd gotten tough enough three years ago to avoid being dragged out of bed by a nun at the toll of the bell. Instead, while everyone else in the orphanage was praying and eating, Gideon slept in her cell. Later she would either eat food she'd already scrounged or, if she was out, she would go scrounge some more. Not for nothing was she proud of her scrounging skills. A granola bar, an extremely well-preserved donut, a cheap breakfast sandwich: these were the joys of her mornings, which no nun had ever tasted.

On this morning, though, when the bell tolled for the first time, Harrowhark Nonagesimus shoved her door open, pushed her head through, and hissed, "psst - Griddle! Be ready to go after prayers!"

"What?" asked Gideon, who was asleep, so it came out as "whh?" and only emerged from her mouth after Harrow had slammed the door again.

It was completely surreal hearing her best friend's voice in the orphanage. As far as she knew, Harrow had never set foot there. She looked around the cell in total bewilderment. It was just light enough to feel like morning without actually being day. Outside a starling was having a fit. When she pushed aside the covers the air was chilly - soon she'd have to dig out the heavy blankets.

On autopilot she stumbled around the room, pulling on clothes, combing her hair, feeling like she'd forgotten something. The feeling hadn't erased itself by the time she made it out into the hallway. Harrow's voice was drifting up the industrial stone stairwell - she was saying something about the preservation of the house and its myriad of traditions, and then, to Gideon's astonishment, Ortus Nigenad, whose grasp of lyric poetry-

Gideon escaped hastily out the back door. On her way out she stole an apple someone had left on the kitchen counter and tore a huge chunk off of it with her teeth. She ate it sitting on the back steps, watching the sun coming up over the trees.

"So why are you inflicting Ortus on all those kids?" Gideon asked plaintively when Harrow finally walked around the side of the building. "Maybe their lives aren't hard enough?"

"I'm hoping some of them actually _like_ his poetry," Harrow said. "If they do, I will have to hear less of it. Come on, Griddle. We have work to do."

They cut through the woods to cross a tiny stream to get to a field. There was a little shed there, overgrown with vines and with a clouded window, which was owned by the Ninth House. Harrow's parents had put it in the field to hold the equipment to mow the grass. But now Harrow let the grass grow high, except for a little path that Gideon kept tamped down, and in the shed were their bikes. (Technically speaking, both of these were Harrow's - but what was Harrow going to do with a second bike, one too big for her? So that was Gideon's now.)

They wheeled out the bikes, locked the shed again, and pushed them down the overgrown path to the road beside the field. Then they set off for the graveyard.

"We're scouting," Harrow called out to her as they rode next to each other. "I need the right kind of environment to hold the ritual I want to hold. The thirty-first of October this year is the new moon - imagine what I can do with that!"

A lot of kind of spooky shit, was Gideon's guess, but she wasn't going to say that out loud. Instead she held the iron gate open for Harrow and closed it behind them.

When they'd been here two years ago, they'd taken a while to explore. Not this time. Harrow had something definite in mind, and she beelined right for the back of the graveyard. Right for the tomb.

"Oh, not again," Gideon groaned.

"Yes, again," Harrow said with surprising patience. "I need the parallel for-"

But what she needed the parallel for Gideon never heard. The nameplate had caught her eye: since they'd last been there, someone had come through and scraped the writing away. There were deep gouges in the stone.

"Who would fuck with a tomb in _this_ town?" she asked, totally bewildered.

"A defaced tomb," Harrow said. She turned the words over slowly in her mouth. Gideon turned to see her think. "Yes. Yes, why not? It's the perfect setting."

Gideon almost asked _why would that make it BETTER?_ but stopped herself. There was no point in hearing whatever explanation she'd get. She wouldn't understand more than three words of it. It was unwise to interrupt Harrow when she went into a black magic fugue anyway, which was exactly what was happening; her friend was pacing the floor of the open tomb, marking out in footsteps the places where she'd put creepy sigils and (of course) bones. Gideon settled in for the afternoon.

After the graveyard they went to find Harrow's supplies. For some reason this involved looting Ortus's library instead of the Reverends'. Ortus had his own room in his own family's house, but the basement of that house was a single dim room he’d turned into a library and littered with a large collection of deep-colored musty tomes and a larger collection of rough-worn paperbacks. Gideon had only been down there twice. She had yet to find any books that suited her. They were all things like _Arc of the Darkened Moon: An Opera in Three Acts_ or _Bruli, or, The Theorems of Bone and Blackness_ or _The Noniad: Volume IV, Acts and Declarations._ Books only Ortus could love. She and Harrow stole down the stairs at the back of the house and stole fifteen or sixteen of these. Harrow picked through them one by one and dropped them into their backpacks, muttering under her breath. She was planning something really unpleasant, Gideon thought, with a little thrill of happiness.

Then Harrow dragged her through a Ninth House storage building - through the dollar store - through a field to pick up flowers and sun-bleached bones. Gideon had always had a strong suspicion that the cultists spent some part of their time cleaning bones and putting them around the town and that Harrow kept track of where the good stuff was. She felt seeing Harrow retrieve eight different gleaming animal skulls from a deserted patch of grass was a pretty good confirmation.

“Not a word,” Harrow said a little sharply when she saw her face.

Gideon held up her hands in peace. “Hey, as long as I’m not one of the people you’re scheduling to go hide ribcages or whatever.”

Her expression at that was a little funny. Gideon couldn’t help laughing, which earned her a punch to the shoulder like a little beesting. Harrow didn’t have any strength to speak of, but she did have some very bony knuckles.

They wound back up in Harrow’s library, where she sorted through her take of the day: battered old books, creepy grayish candles, a bottle of ominously viscous red liquid, the aforementioned eight heterogenous animal skulls, two boxes of chalk, matches, and a large bottle of some kind of alcohol. Gideon was tentatively curious about this last but wasn’t sure that anything the Ninth had ever produced was capable of tasting good, so she thought she’d give it a pass.

As they’d spent the day ducking in and out of Drearburh’s buildings, an idea had been building in her. Gideon had spent most of the day considering whether she was going to ask for it. It seemed like a lot, but also like maybe, to Harrow, it wouldn’t be.

Ultimately, the prospect of never having a nun poke her head into her room again decided it for her.

“Harrow,” Gideon asked, “you know that shed we keep the bikes in?”

“Yes?” Harrow said. She was cataloguing the chalk for some reason and had taken it all out of the boxes to lay it out side by side and compare lengths. “What about it?”

“Could I, you know,” said Gideon, and was suddenly seized by embarrassment and couldn’t look at her anymore. She felt more than saw Harrow shift her attention over when she realized. “Fix it up? And stay there?”

Harrow was silent for a minute, then said, “and not at the orphanage.”

Her tone of voice was once again unreadable to Gideon, who found it almost unbearable that someone whose hip she’d been joined at for years could all of a sudden start puberty and pull out a whole set of secret emotions. “Yeah,” she said, “and not at the orphanage. Look, I know Crux probably wakes you up every day with the caterwauling vocal cords of dead men-” (“We don’t work with _flesh,_ Gideon, what a _disgusting_ habit-”) “but, you know, I don’t like it when every morning I have to tell a nun where I am. None of the kids there really pay that much attention to me.” (This was the closest she would ever come to acknowledging the weird position that being Harrow’s companion and also a total heretic had put her in.) “I’m barely there. The shed’s sound, it just needs a little work.”

“It needs more than a little work, Nav. The temperature is already starting to drop. You have six weeks, maximum, before the weather turns.”

“I know, but-” pride clogged her throat. Gideon couldn’t back off the request and couldn’t argue for it, couldn’t tell Harrow how badly she wanted to no longer be living in the land of nuns and orphans, in a building that always smelled a little like leek and a little like depression. There had to be something better than that. And Harrow literally held the key.

“As long as you’ll accept help fixing it up,” Harrow said.

“What?” Gideon said, and then, “yeah, for sure.” And then, “wait, who’s going to help?”

“Me, obviously. Maybe Aiglamene.”

Gideon whooped at the top of her lungs, which was a stupid fucking thing to do. But Harrow was actually _smiling_ at her, and Crux didn’t immediately appear from the stairwell, and she was going to move out of the orphanage. In less than a month she’d punched her ticket out of school and now out of nun central. Everything was coming up Gideon. All she had to do was figure out heating and insulation, and that was fine! Every other shitty building in town managed to get through the winter. Her little shed wouldn’t be any different.

Her mood had yet to sink when she made it downstairs and out onto the lawn. The sun had sunk below the trees, casting all but the very top of Harrow’s scraggly house into shadow. The two shining windows at the top caught her eye.

These were Harrow’s parents’ quarters, where they’d gone to live when they took their vows of silence. The only people who went there now were Harrow and Crux.

It occurred very suddenly to Gideon - the knowledge fell on her like a sword dropped from orbit - that in all her time in Harrow’s library, with her tiny bedroom right next door, she wasn’t sure if she’d ever heard anyone walking overhead. 

She’d heard Crux start up the stairs and had to escape quickly down a different set to get out before he found her. The house was old, wooden, and creaky. But she couldn’t remember if she’d ever heard the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father moving around in their rooms.

Something else caught her eye right as she was winding up to start freaking out. Harrow had come to stand at the window right below where she was watching. When she saw she had Gideon’s attention, she did a tiny, stifled little wave. Her hand was a little splash of flesh under her severe, black-and-white painted face with all its detail. Gideon couldn’t help but feel a little silliness buried deep under the equally secret surge of affection. Why would she notice the two of them moving around? She had never had to pay attention to it before. Unless the Reverend Parents had been jumping up and down on the floor and blowing dust into her magazines, she’d never have thought about it.

She waved back to Harrow, feeling herself stretch pleasantly as she reached upwards, and started back to the orphanage. Night was coming, and she had to go see Aiglamene as early as she could on Sunday.


	5. In which Harrowhark Nonagesimus gains, then loses, a toilet.

September and October slipped away from Gideon in a haze of physical activity. During the day she drilled, followed Aiglamene around looking muscular, and took care of every weapon the captain could get her hands on. After "school" she spent her time working on the shed.

She'd started by cleaning the whole thing. It had stacked up a decade or two of dust and cobwebs, barely disturbed by their bikes, which had been put outside under a tarp while Gideon worked. She swept out the dust, realized she hadn't cleaned the rafters, cleaned the rafters, swept out the dust again, scrubbed down the window and then the rest of the walls, swept one more time, and finally mopped and scrubbed the floor. By the time she was done, she could at least see what she was working with.

The shed had held up just fine for being a few decades old, and it was larger than her cell at the orphanage. But it was basically a wooden shell meant to secure whatever was inside of it. The only insulation on it came in the form of vines, the door needed to be changed so that Gideon could lock it from the inside as well as the outside, and it had no running water. This last was something Gideon was particularly struggling with. If she had to, she could live by using showers elsewhere - but the toilet was non-negotiable. She wasn't going to be going into the woods to relieve herself in the middle of winter.

Still, the early work went well. It was rewarding shoving tiny mountains of dirt out the front door and seeing darkened wood left behind. The leaves started to change, green to half-yellow to gold, and the air was cool outside of sunlight. As she worked, the world around her started to scramble for what it needed for winter. The cultists stopped planting summer leeks and started planting snow leeks. Harrow spent a week buried in books and not talking to anyone besides her and Crux, then emerged and refused to say what she'd been doing. Halloween decorations started to appear: cloth spiderwebs, paper cut in the shapes of black cats and bats, and, of course, a skeleton or six at every house. Aiglamene extracted a promise from her that, given the easily-to-access contents of the cult's communal stores, her scrounging would include more protein gels and vegetables and less fried items. As consolation, her biceps were approaching truly impressive, and she no longer wanted to collapse after drilling.

The first Friday in October was disheartening for the simple reason that it was rainy. Gideon had been preparing to give the area around the window an extra seal, but when she arrived in the afternoon, half the shed was drenched.

Until this point she had felt pretty great about putting the shed together with her hands. Everything Gideon had ever had was either given to her by the Ninth or scavenged from its slow, unchanging bulk. Maybe the opportunity to live in the shed had come from the Ninth - because, at the end of the day, Harrowhark Nonagesimus _was_ the Ninth - but the effort would be coming from Gideon. That made it more hers than anything she had except her body and her sword (which she loved way too much to let the Ninth have any credit for).

Now she kind of saw why Harrow had hesitated. It was a twenty year old shed. Looking at the vine-encrusted building from deep inside her hoodie in a break in the rain, of course the roof leaked. They'd never cared before if it didn't get on the bikes, but that obviously mattered a lot to her now.

Gideon was fully prepared to have a good, full afternoon of moping about this, but Harrow arrived not even five minutes later, as she was gloomily standing in the doorway and surveilling the new coat of dirty water on the floor. She heard a biting little throat-clear right behind her and turned around and there was Harrow, lacy black umbrella held over her head, a little roll of something held under her arm.

"Hey," Gideon said, startled. "What's going on? Won't your paint melt off if you're in the rain?"

Harrow shook the umbrella toward her a little bit, in a meaningful way, and said, "are you going to let me in or not?"

The roll turned out to be insulation. Harrow laid it out on the dry part of the floor and the two of them crowded around it. The bottom roll was a thin layer of waterproofing plastic. "It won't be perfect," Harrow warned, "but you'll be doing other things to waterproof anyway." On top of that was a thick layer of some kind of foamy cloth. She had cut out a rectangle of each of them and stacked them to come show Gideon. "You'll tack the plastic flush to the walls, build out a little framing to hold the insulation, and tack that up too. Then you build an interior wall over that."

"Wow!" said Gideon. "Where did you dig this up?"

"One of the storehouses has building materials from four or five years ago- it wasn't hard. There's more to be had," Harrow told her. "But look."

She discharged from inside her black robe a pale sheet of paper covered with tiny, assholeish handwriting and clean ruler-drawn lines. This got spread out on top of the insulation, and the two of them crowded even closer. Gideon squinted at the handwriting. She could make out in one corner the sentence "SOLAR - WIRING THROUGH ANTERIOR SOCKET?"

"Have you thought about heating and cooling?" asked Harrow.

"Uh," said Gideon, who had not.

"Oh, Griddle," Harrow said. It had the faintest tinge of condescension to it - just enough for Harrowhark to enjoy, Gideon thought, stifling a sudden laugh, without her putting any of her precious brainpower into a witty comeback. "Here. We'll have to cut a vent for it, but-"

"We?" Gideon interrupted. "Wait, are _you_ going to do something physical?"

Harrow gave this the look it deserved. The look was a good one: all milk-curdling scorn and nunnish disapproval. Gideon (who, after all, had also grown up around Crux) didn't react. "Obviously not. For this, your actions will be - expressing my will."

This was such a weirdly prudish way to say "I'm going to boss you around _so_ hard" that Gideon struggled with dire temptation. It would be so easy to make a joke, something about how Harrow sounded like she was talking about her cavalier - _shouldn't you actually watch me in a tourney first?_ , or _bad news, Nonagesimus, I know you want me to kneel in public and say I'm yours to command but-_. But right as she gave in and almost opened her mouth, she couldn't quite fit the joke together right, or quite decide what to say. And then common sense kicked in and sent a chill down her spine. If she joked about being Harrow's cavalier, then Harrow would know that the thought of being cavalier had crossed her mind - even just as an infirm joke. She shut up and listened.

* * *

Harrow was with her at the shed every afternoon for two weeks. This was an almost incomprehensible amount of time for the Reverend Daughter to spend in Gideon's space, and it meant that at least once or twice a day Crux or some other Ninth follower would turn up asking for her input. But without Harrow the shed never would have become habitable. Waterproofing, insulation, a tiny heating/cooling combo unit that had been scrapped but still worked, copper pipes to connect to the tiny water hookup Harrow pointed out on an ancient-looking survey map, a whole new window _and_ a whole new door, a plain battered sink that must have come from the town laundry: Harrow knew where all these things were, and what Gideon could do to ensure her thefts weren't noticed, and how they should work together on a building.

Gideon, who had never exactly thought of herself as biddable, did reluctantly acknowledge that Harrow's instructions on where to cut holes and hammer nails helped too. It wasn't that she couldn't have figured it out, but it did seem to cut down on the number of mistakes.

Finally, early on a Saturday morning that edged into the second half of October, Harrow turned up with two of the last and most important details.

Gideon arrived early, while some poor Ninth cultist was having to edge their trailer-toting pickup truck backwards into the correct position according to the imperious hand-waving of a very young teenager. On the trailer was a second, tinier shed, almost the same height as hers but a fraction of the width.

"What is this?" she demanded to know.

Harrowhark sneered. "It's my birthday present to myself. It's a building with a composting toilet in it, Griddle, and don't think I didn't notice that you never bothered to figure out the bathroom!" (This was true - the sink she’d lugged back from the mouldering warehouse was for her food setup.) "It’s going in whether you like it or not. This way I'll never have to worry about tripping over excrement in my woods, or _you_ in my water supply.”

Gideon flipped her off, which felt great for a second, and then made her feel embarrassed. It was such a stupid feeling and that in turn pissed her off. Why would flipping Harrow off feel more like punching her? She had a long and grand history of flipping her off, and could only vaguely remember punching in their distant childhood, which seemed like a move too far now given that Harrow’s bones were made of papier-mache or something like that. She worked at shoving the baby shed into position in an awkward and unpleasant silence.

Whatever lay wrong between them magnified itself to fill the space they left for it. By the end, when the shed had been nudged around to Harrow’s mean satisfaction and the cultist driving the pickup truck had been allowed to depart, Gideon wanted to vibrate out of her own skin. Her embarrassment and frustration hadn’t gone anywhere. Harrow hadn’t said anything else about it, not even a snide remark about her having a cur’s manners or a smug one about how Gideon couldn’t even figure out how she’d be pissing in her own house.

“Look,” she finally growled. It came out meaner than she meant. “The whole town isn’t going to catch cholera from me and kick it all at once. Take a chill pill, Nonagesimus.”

The moment crystallized painfully and broke around them. Harrow’s face was aflame with the terrible devoutness that Gideon knew lived in her, but crueler - the look of a wounded zealot. She had the sharpness of ancient and furious swords.

“I would not take one single _thing_ you offered me,” Harrowhark said with the chill of the grave, and left.

This didn’t make any sense, but if she’d driven Harrow to incoherence, it didn’t make her feel any better. Gideon stood there a moment, then slammed her front door open. She had painting to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My goal here is to have the next chapter up on either the 30th or the 31st... it's dark magic time babeyyyyyy


	6. In which Harrowhark Nonagesimus practices necromancy.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Late Halloween chapter! I don't feel I got enough Halloween this year. Everything was happening all of the time and very little of it was Halloween-ey.

Thankfully for whatever kind of conscience that being a bona fide young adult was building in Gideon, she and Harrow agreed (mutually, silently, with the skill of long practice) to pretend the whole episode hadn’t happened. They stayed apart for three bizarre days. The gray clouds crowded up against Drearburh, but it remained warm and windy, whipping dying leaves back and forth, threatening an out-of-season thunderstorm but never quite getting there. Gideon barely left the shed, installing a new front door and cutting and framing a hole to let herself into Harrow’s gifted addition. She hated to admit it, but the toilet was handy. Aiglamene came and dragged her away halfway through day three to go and drill, and even she had to admit that the shed was coming along nicely. Another few weeks and Gideon might manage to make it her new residence before winter.

On the fourth day Harrow turned up, robed in black, to keep bossing her around. This was the most Harrowhark Nonagesimus apology possible. The only thing keeping them from reaching maximum Harrowhark Nonagesimus was the shed’s total lack of cobwebbed spellbooks or skulls you could drink out of. When she arrived, she was still fuming over Ortus Nigenad’s latest efforts at composition and, as effect follows cause, the efforts at declaiming that would probably make him the late Ortus Nigenad. Gideon got on with her caulking and settled back into their normal.

Then, one morning, the murmur of other kids waking in the orphanage had a little life to it. The nuns sounded more resigned than usual. Nobody bothered sticking their head in to even check if Gideon was there, and, as she laid in bed, she realized that it was Halloween.

Aiglamene had released her from the heavy responsibility of the weight room the day before. She’d had something solemn to say about duty to the Ninth and not shirking when her presence would help. If you asked Gideon, which no one had, this was basically just her saying to go and distract Harrow so she didn’t freak about everyone having fun on her birthday. So she had nowhere else to be but Harrow’s sepulchral presence.

Harrow herself was sitting in her library nursing a sad little tube of flavorless crackers when Gideon dragged herself up the stairs. She had clearly put extra effort into her paint that day. The bones of the skull were delicate in places, the shadows more velvety than usual, and the jaw was segmented into three parts divided by bands of black. Her knuckles almost shone through her skin where she was slowly tearing apart the crumb-filled casing.

"Happy birthday!" Gideon said cheerfully. "You look miserable."

"I'm adequate," Harrow said. This was in her most doleful tone of voice, the one she'd obviously modeled off of Crux's lectures on the dark futures of the Ninth. "For the day."

"Cool!" said Gideon. "You still look miserable. Did you eat enough crackers?"

"I have three more. Did you see the new box?"

Gideon hadn't. It was in the shadows by the feet of her chair. She fell upon it like a wolf on the fold to tear the cardboard open. _VAMPIRESS OF THE MARCH!_ said the issue on top. _HUNTRESS OF EMPIRES STRIKES AGAIN!_ The cover model was weirdly skinny.

It had been months since Drearburh had had a new shipment, and she was starving for something new. _SPIDERLORDS IN HATRED _had ended without any form of satisfaction, since the main character had died to save her colony in such a depressing way that Gideon had no intent of re-reading.__

__"I need to finish this book before we do anything tonight," said Harrow._ _

__This suited Gideon fine. It was a strange burst of nostalgia, to lie down on the library floor and dig through a brand new cache of pulp magazines. She didn't remember the thin, ancient carpet pressing so unpleasantly to her elbows and knees before, and _VAMPIRESS OF THE MARCH _was probably not the sort of magazine she would have gravitated towards. Looking at the opening spread, she wasn't sure she was old enough to read it now.___ _

____Harrow and her bone theorems weren't going to notice what she was looking at, though. Gideon rolled onto her back, opened the magazine above her head, and stuck in her nose._ _ _ _

____She took much longer staring in awe at a few select pages of _VAMPIRESS OF THE MARCH_ than she would ever admit later. When she finished reading, the day had essentially fast-forwarded itself. The wind was rustling dead leaves against the side of Harrow’s house. Dusk had already fallen. Gideon blinked foolishly at the window: she wasn’t even hungry._ _ _ _

____“Now,” Harrow said, with barely-restrained excitement. “Let’s go.”_ _ _ _

____They almost fled the house, wind whipping at their backs, pushing them forward. Something in the cooling air caught at Gideon, too - Harrow’s excitement was leaking. They darted through the streets, avoiding kids in capes, masks, helmets and armor, chains, stupid-looking balls of fabric meant to look like pumpkins, and frothy pink ballerina skirts - through the woods - through the field next to Gideon’s shed - to the tarp covering their bicycles._ _ _ _

____The last of the light was fading from one side of the field. A thin, wide sliver of moon was barely visible over the trees on the other. Little table scraps of clouds fled across the sky. Gideon threw back the tarp with a flourish. Harrow pulled her bag out from inside the shed and curtly said, "arms, Griddle!"_ _ _ _

____"You were keeping a bag full of skulls in my _house?_ " Gideon demanded. She offered her arms and shrugged the backpack on, though. What that said about her she wasn't really sure, but it was probably something she already knew._ _ _ _

____"The sword, too," Harrow decided right as they were about to leave. Gideon swore, and dropped her bike, and stalked back into her shed to find and arrange the sword on her person while also carrying an ominously heavy backpack. This needed Harrow's help again. But at last they were ready to go._ _ _ _

____They biked back out of the downtrodden path and onto the street. This side of town didn't have as many houses in it, and most of the kids had already left for the throng of Ninth House supporters listening to Crux's admonishments about worshipping sugar as their yearly form of penance before actually getting to have fun. As they approached the graveyard, they met no one._ _ _ _

____"When we get there," said Harrow, who was pushing her bike up the hill and making a valiant effort not to pant. Gideon was pushing her own bike along in solidarity and suffering not at all. "Put the bag down _GENTLY-"_ she said this as if Gideon could not be trusted with simple tasks- "outside of the defaced tomb. I will array them in the sepulchre and show you where to sit. You will sit there with your naked sword and not touch _ANYTHING."__ _ _ _

____"I'm the queen of not touching anything," Gideon pointed out. "I successfully don't touch anything in your library all the time. I don't touch anything at all in any Ninth House building."_ _ _ _

____"Griddle, I am going to be building a very large circle of evocation on the floor of this tomb, and if you stand up and walk over it at all or reach out your hand to play with the dust I'm using, I can't threaten you with what otherworldly influence will get into your body because, to be honest, I am not even sure." Harrow paused to subtly get her air back after this way-too-long threat, then continued, "also, you constantly touch things in my library. You raid it for food at least once a week."_ _ _ _

____Thus chastised, Gideon did as she was bid and carefully put the backpack down._ _ _ _

____Harrow descended upon it with sorcerer's greed written all over her face. She pulled out the bundle of candles and the dried flowers. She pulled out the animal skulls. She pulled out - ugh! - a real, human skull, one of the ones from her parents’ library. Out came four bottles, the chalk, the matches, a really creepy looking black knife, and, finally emptying the bag, the books from Ortus. Seeing the whole haul, Gideon couldn't help but wonder how her back hadn't fallen off on the way to the graveyard. Harrow wasn't even done yet, fishing around in her own pockets._ _ _ _

____She pulled out a flashlight, a little flask and another tube of wafers, and pushed the last two into Gideon's hands. "Make sure I eat these afterwards," she said. Her tone was funereal, and not for the first time, Gideon wondered exactly how her best friend had wound up being someone who sounded happier about finding a human skeleton than about food._ _ _ _

____Then Harrow pulled open the door of the tomb and set to work._ _ _ _

____It was as they'd left it: clean, dry floor, dark, with a scratched-out nameplate. Harrow set the candles out first. Most of them went into a semicircle across from the doorway, but four others (two very large, and, after a moment of thought, two more that were jet black) were placed apparently at random on the floor. Then Harrow gestured at the corner just inside the door._ _ _ _

____“Go there and stay,” she ordered, like she’d talk to a dog, or to Ortus._ _ _ _

____“Don’t funnel the ghosts over to me,” Gideon warned. But she went there and stayed._ _ _ _

____Harrow got down on her hands and knees and, with the chalk, drew a way-too-large diagram on the floor. It took her ages. Gideon settled in, flask and crackers held at the ready, and helpfully started daydreaming about tripping other kids off the stage at the cav tournament, maybe while flexing a little bit. The wind whispered outside. It was fully night now, and the only noises were the raspy scratch of the chalk, the hitched breaths as Harrow immersed herself in eldritch mystery. _Happy birthday, you fucking weirdo,_ Gideon thought with no real malice. _That’s the wrong number of candles, but I guess ghosts don’t care exactly how old you are.__ _ _ _

____Finally she was done. Fine, white lines looped around each candle, sketching out and partitioning the spaces between them in a completely incomprehensible way. Next came one of the bottles, which held some kind of pale, off-white dust that Gideon very intentionally did not think about too hard. It was basically guaranteed to be human bones, but a little plausible deniability never kept her awake at night. Harrow trickled this slowly, carefully along the chalk lines until it stopped trickling, and then she swapped over to the second bottle, which seemed to hold the exact same thing._ _ _ _

____“Remember what I said,” she warned Gideon one more time. “Don’t touch anything.”_ _ _ _

____A strange expression washed over Harrow’s face as she started to turn away, like peace, or maybe exhaustion. The animal skulls were placed with extreme gentleness circling the doorway, and the human skull in the middle of them, facing out into the night._ _ _ _

____She lit the first match, and from below it threw light and new shadow across her face. "I come to question," she said, and touched the match to the nearest candle. In one shockingly deft movement she shook the match out and dropped it to draw another. "I come to see," she said, and lit the second candle._ _ _ _

____Each of the first seven candles received a little announcement like that, ending in "I come to judge." When Harrowhark paused again there was one left in the original semicircle. She lit it silently and moved on._ _ _ _

____"I refuse supplication," Harrow said, "as an impediment to necessity." Her feet, knifelike as the rest of her, were picking their way deliberately across the enormous diagram. "I refuse weregild, and the claim of negligence and innocence alike…"_ _ _ _

____It was like being stuck as a child in front of Drearburh's pulpit. Harrow had a gift for being what she was: a preacher and a child of preachers in a wretched death cult. Even as a small child, reading excerpts of old sermons in the arctic hall as an interlude between her parents' bits, she'd been the most compelling part of the service. Her voice had an emerging fervour to it - her words rose and broadened as she preached to an empty tomb, nobody there to listen but Gideon. Not one word made sense._ _ _ _

____"Patron of the beginning," she said, "and, now, of the end: the first enchained to the last." And she lit the first black candle, and started tiptoeing back across the room. "Faithful heresiarch, work unfinished…"_ _ _ _

____Gideon was aware that she was watching an attempt at necromancy, but all of the skin on her arms realized at once that Harrow was _actually_ trying to summon a ghost, or maybe a demon. She scowled and brushed uselessly at the goosebumps. Harrow didn't even notice. It was getting harder to hear her, because with her head turned away from Gideon and towards her next waxy target, her words were echoing weirdly off the inside of the tomb._ _ _ _

____Harrow lit the second black candle and kept right on going. The prickling on Gideon's skin crept up the back of her arms and over her shoulders. She wanted to shake herself like an animal. The temperature was dropping outside, and a wash of cold air pushed its way past her through the doorway. She slumped in silence when she felt it: fall was finally here in earnest, and she still had some work to do on the shed roof._ _ _ _

____Harrow got to big candle #1. "Lord-" she said, and stopped. Her voice had clenched its fists and drawn itself tight. Gideon didn't know what the hell she was going to do if her birthday present had goaded Harrow into crying. After the longest moment of the month, though, she pulled herself together and continued: "Lord, this is the reminder. What you have said, we have heard. What you have given, we have received. It is done and unfinished. We will find out about the morning."_ _ _ _

____And she lit the candle, and kept going towards the last one. Gideon found that her eyes could not track her for a moment - the flames of the other candles caught her and held her instead - there was no reason for the light to be growing, or becoming blue, as if the fire was heating up; but it was -_ _ _ _

____Harrow's foot landed by the last. She reached down and picked it up gently, touched it with more care than the candle could ever have been shown before, and tucked it to her chest unselfconsciously. Gideon stared. Over it Harrow said nothing. She bent her head until her hair reached for the wick, and her lips moved, but nothing came out._ _ _ _

____Certainty seized Gideon. A ravine of dread created itself in her chest. Harrow didn’t want her to hear whatever this prayer was. She was hiding something._ _ _ _

____Harrow lit the match, then the candle. She held onto it for a moment, unwilling to let it pass out of her hands. The growing light of the wick flickered weirdly over her chin. Shadows trembled on her face. They made her cheeks strangely gaunt and emphasized the shadows under her eyes - in short, she looked like shit. Gideon’s hand closed in her pocket._ _ _ _

____Harrow put down the candle and picked up another bottle._ _ _ _

____This was one of the extra-creepy ones, and it was full of viscous red liquid. Gideon had read a lot of magazines about human sacrifice. It usually seemed to involve a victim with cleavage, which she wasn’t sure Harrow had heard of yet, but maybe someone else on the Ninth had sacrificed whoever this liquid had come from and Harrow just got the spoils._ _ _ _

____(This was a joke, if it could be called that, and she was telling it to herself to make herself feel better. It didn’t work.)_ _ _ _

____Harrow took the bottle and upended it. Liquid splattered bluntly over the floor. "I am no practitioner of the book of blue fire," she said. "But here we are, doom-driven, reaching for the aquifer. Has this study been worth it? Am I at last to be useful?"_ _ _ _

____Outside, a rooster crowed. Gideon jumped and came perilously close to the diagram. Another, hearing the first, crowed itself, and a third joined in. Sound travelled weirdly in the tomb, she realized: the last noise sounded like it had come from the ground underneath them. A dog started howling somewhere nearby._ _ _ _

____"What the fuck," Gideon whispered, mostly by accident. "What the fuck are you doing?"_ _ _ _

____Harrow uncorked a second bottle. She didn't even throw it on the floor. As the stopper came open, the candles blazed - and now Gideon could not deny anything - the hair on her head prickled and her palms sweated fretfully - with _black fire._ Harrow's face had calcified in a mask of furious triumph. Her cheekbones stood out even through the paint, starved and sleepless. The flames grew higher and higher; they were starting to roar now. The sound was terrifying. If Gideon had been standing up she would have tried to run. She wanted to scream for Harrow to stop, that she believed her now about the magic, but if she did would Harrow lose control? Would whatever was coming eat both of them? It was the cavalier's job to protect the necromancer, but here she was, hoping for their lives that Harrow was such a good magician that she could get them out of this safely. Against this there was nothing she could do. But she didn't want to die._ _ _ _

____"Thank you," Harrow said, and Gideon had never heard adoration in her voice before quite like that. She turned again, and in her hands was the black knife. Gideon froze._ _ _ _

____With a quick movement, Harrow extinguished her candle with the blade of her knife. Silence descended. Water dripped somewhere nearby. Gideon swore she could hear the wax against the metal, but when Harrow lifted the knife again, she could see it was clean._ _ _ _

____Next to go was one of the black candles. Harrow whispered something unintelligible to it. Then the first of the normal tapers; the second; the third; the fourth… Around the semicircle she went, and when she reached the last one, she paused. "Stop being such an ass," she said clearly and stupidly to a candle. Then she put it out too._ _ _ _

____Gideon felt something in her unhinge. The whole situation was too much. What she had seen was unbelievable, and she felt herself trying not to believe it even a minute after it had happened. Harrow never insulted anyone in such short words. Harrow did not talk to inanimate objects, unless she was holding conversations with skulls when Gideon wasn't around. Candles did not burn with black fire._ _ _ _

____But there were still two candles burning, and the flames were still black. Harrow reached for the larger one._ _ _ _

____"Lord," she said, and nothing more, and pressed the flame down into the wax to extinguish it._ _ _ _

____Now the last candle. It was a simple black taper, and as Harrow reached for it, it went back to normal. A little pale yellow light flickered into view on top of it. Harrow picked it up and stepped out of the circle. "Up," she directed Gideon. "Don't touch anything. Step over the skulls…"_ _ _ _

____Numbly Gideon took herself and her sword back out into the night. There were no chickens or dogs outside. It wasn't even cold anymore. It was just a Halloween night._ _ _ _

____Behind her Harrow had closed the doors. She heard the clink of metal. When she turned around, there was a chain padlocked over the entrance to the tomb. The world hovered strangely over the bits of her capable of thought._ _ _ _

____"I wanted to use these," Harrow said, maybe to herself, looking down at the books. "But I was afraid to."_ _ _ _

____Wordlessly, Gideon pressed the tube of crackers into her hands. She ate in silence, drank her water from the flask. Then they started for home._ _ _ _


	7. In which Gideon Nav is on the case.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This month! This year! Yikes!
> 
> Since starting this fic right after HtN's release, I've come to realize that Harrow is meant to be mixed Maori, and I had initially written her as the kind of white that goes lobster red if there is a single ray of sunlight shining in the same hemisphere. I THINK I have caught all such references and changed them, but if you find one, please point it out to me so I can get it too. (I have left Harrow in chapter one believing that she will get sunburnt very easily; this is both for comedic effect and to demonstrate her suspicion and mistrust.)
> 
> Also, if you are interested, the music I have for the spooky parts of this fic is [the soundtrack to Kholat,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IrsdIPWwBU&list=PLMXR8sD2YkbLec5S92nClPdFrmvinbu4q) a horror game I have never played, by Arkadiusz Reikowski. The music for the non-spooky parts is [the album Fragments by Bear's Den.](https://open.spotify.com/album/2pVVjeGjdE7DBbq8iOaWVe)
> 
> Thanks, everyone, for your very nice comments in the time since I last updated!

The following morning Gideon woke up very suddenly in her bed at the orphanage. The light filtered in grayly, and the window was covered in long lashes of water. A thunderstorm had finally come to fruition and was doing its best to strip the dying leaves off the trees. The previous night spread out in her mind, now that her stupid idiot nervous system had taken a little breather: Harrow’s face turned older, gaunter. Harrow reciting her strange ritual. Harrow opening the stopper on a small bottle of blood.

Gideon held this idea between gritted teeth. Hurt and confusion and fury chased each other in her until every emotion she had was disjointed and chimeric. A cacophony was rising in her profane, shitty soul. None of this could have happened, but all of it had. Harrowhark had _done something_ in the defaced tomb. Animal sounds, colored fire, drafts… did she really think she wouldn’t remember? Or that she wouldn’t believe it had happened? Gideon had trusted her, because how could she not trust someone who grew up half a step away, the only person in the world who was not a stranger to her? Drearburh was malicious and unfriendly, but Harrow....

But, when she thought, she saw Harrow in that window, waving to her.

She got up from bed with a newfound grimness. On went her black, practical clothes. On went her two-hander. Then she took it all off. The idea pressing down on her was too big to take in all at once, and Gideon walked back and forth across her cell again and again, thinking about one piece of it at a time. Harrow had done magic - Harrow’s studies might be _real_ \- Harrow was summoning the dead and touching human bones - Harrow had almost made out with a candle - Harrow had made a rooster crow underground…

She forced herself to put on her building clothes instead, and to leave the orphanage to dash to the shed. Gideon was grateful to get out of the rain and into a building she had, finally, put her stolen heater in. The temperature was finally starting to drop, but it was almost finished. One of the windows needed a little bit more sealant around one edge, and she went to work mechanically, still suffering through this seismic change in perspective.

By the time she was done with the window, Gideon had put together a coherent thought, which was that she had no fucking clue what was going on.

Connecting the wiring of the bathroom to the wiring of the rest of the shed would have to wait, but there was still some paint to touch up, and a cabinet to put together. This she started in on to let her body do something while her brain chugged along uselessly. The town of Drearburh had become a mystery to her in one night. If the Ninth House wasn't a sad little fucked up cult with kind of hilarious beliefs - if Harrow had lied by omission at every one of Gideon’s scoffs - if it was real....

When dusk started closing in, Gideon put the tools away with a sense of finality. It almost felt like relief. There was no one in the entire world she could ask. She was totally alone. So she would have to go herself and find out what was going on.

This was a Saturday, which meant night services for the Ninth. These were led by Harrow, who would not in ten thousand years be caught showing up late to her own preaching. So Gideon casually killed a little more time at the shed by working on the stupid details houses apparently needed, like switch covers and drawer handles, and then, just as Harrow would be leaving her home, sprinted back to the orphanage. She had left her sword there that morning, but if she freaked out a little about cutting through the woods, well, all the cultists were in church anyway, so who would know?

Back in the relative safety of the tiny room she was due to leave, Gideon threw her building clothes (which carried way too strong of a paint odor to be considered stealthy) on the floor and hastily pulled on the shirt and pants she'd discarded that morning. She fastened on her two-hander. On her way out the door, she stole a flashlight from the closet in the entryway.

There was one place where she _knew_ that something specific was wrong. Harrow's parents, wherever they were, weren't in the top floor of her house. There was no way in hell Gideon had spend hundreds of hours right under their bedroom and never heard a single creak. In retrospect this was so painfully, stupidly obvious that every time she thought about it she wanted to bash her own head into a tree. How was it that Gideon had never noticed? Had Harrow done that good a job of distracting her whenever it might come up? Harrow and Crux both had to be in on it, but no one else expected to see the Reverend Parents in the first place. Gideon could barely remember the two of them walking around. It was a perfect crime except for how blatant and dumb it was.

She came out of the woods and into Harrow's backyard. The house was silent, but every lamp inside looked like it was on. Carefully she crept up to the front porch. The wooden skulls and rocks glistened half-white and wet-looking in the escaping light.

The door was unlocked. Gideon opened it. She barely breathed, waiting there on the threshold in the dark. But nothing happened. It was just the worst, most ominous house in all of existence, even if it was not trying to kill her yet.

There were no wallets or keys in the basin when she stepped inside - all the faithful would be in the chapel, blocks away from her. Crux wasn't here. No one was going to stop her now.

She put her foot on the first stair. A horrible, scraping shriek came out of the wood - she jumped back reflexively and went for her sword. But again, nothing with a thousand teeth sprang out. All that emerged was a little cloud of wood dust. The termites had finally infiltrated the house of the Reverend Daughter. Rather than risk falling through the stairs, Gideon looped through the kitchen, which was as spotless and empty as ever, and then up through their secret passageway.

Harrow’s library was exactly as Harrow had left it, half-full cups of water and all. Harrow’s actual bedroom was a tiny little cell much like Gideon’s, and it was off the library, which probably meant that she liked being in there and had moved there on purpose. To access anything else on this floor, Gideon had to open the library door and tiptoe out through the bright silence.

She came to the foot of the staircase up, and her legs would not move anymore. Everything in her screamed, not with fear, but with attention: every part of her body hyperfocused in one long, lean, bitter moment, which said, _you know what’s on the other side of that door at the top. You know what you’re going to find._

“I know they’re dead,” Gideon said out loud, to get the taste of the words out of her mouth. “I already know they are.” She drew the sword, and took the stairs two at a time. She grasped the doorknob, which had been oiled, probably by Crux. And she threw open the door.

Her first thought was that it was a room full of floorboards. She wasn’t wrong. It was completely empty. All there was to see was eaves and floor.

The third level of the Reverend House spread out before her. It was maliciously unremarkable. She’d been expecting a pair of corpses, or maybe, knowing the Ninth, a pair of skeletons on stone altars. Barring that Gideon had thought there might be _another_ ominous doorway, one leading down to the depths beneath Drearburh, which now seemed like it really might have horrible caves and ominous warrens for bone wizards to torture innocents in. Instead, there weren’t even any walls. Whoever had built this house hadn’t bothered to make it a usable space. Forget closet space or a bed - the single blue-toned light battened onto the center of the ceiling didn’t even show an electrical outlet.

While Gideon wrestled titanically with what in the world she was supposed to do with this, her feet carried her farther in. She found herself pausing, looking down at her foot, angling the sword away so she could see properly. Then she knelt.

By the light of the flashlight, she made out on the floor six faded brown droplets.

Every one of her nerves shrieked like a Ninth child tattletaling. Unwillingly her hand moved. The light swept out over the floor of the room. In places there were tiny piles of pale dust, but underneath them - underneath -

The door closed behind her with a click. She dropped the flashlight to get two hands for her two-hander, whirled and jumped up at the same time. Harrowhark Nonagesimus’ face greeted her in perfect paint.

“Well?” said Harrow.

_"Well?"_ Gideon half-screamed, half-squeaked in horror, and had to cough. Harrow waited patiently. This was great, since she had to grope around for her coherence. “Well, _what?_ Well, you found my horrible serial killer lair? Well, you are definitely going to lop my head off with your big sword? Well, I’m a murderer and I’ve killed like _thirty_ people?”

_”Thirty_ people?” Harrow repeated, amazed. “Why would I have killed thirty people?”

“Oh, excuse me, my mistake. It must have been thirty of those glass bottles that dumped all this dried blood on the floor! Shut the fuck up and start talking, Harrow. Who's dead?"

Gideon found she could barely get the last few words out, because she knew the answer. But then Harrow said, quietly, “in all my time living in this town, I have never killed anyone. Griddle - Gideon -”

She shut up, which Gideon was intensely grateful for - what was she supposed to do? Somehow figure out if Harrow was telling the truth or not? - but to her growing horror it was only to think. Harrow looked small and tired and not even mean anymore.

"Follow me," she said when the moment of silence was over, and then, as if to forestall the verbal warhead Gideon was priming, "please." 

“Fine,” said Gideon’s mouth before Gideon’s reeling brain could be consulted.

The two of them went out and down the stairs and down the stairs again and exited into the dampened night. The leaves were limp and brown and slick with leftover water. Someone had been murdered on the top floor of Harrow's house. There was a complete silence between them. It felt, as they stepped off the last stair of the porch and onto the wizening grass, as if they were making a much longer journey than they were, and as if at its finish something would probably be over.

"Come on," Harrow finally said as they passed into the trees. "We'll need the bikes."

It was a much different walk than the one they had taken twenty-four hours earlier. Odd bits of light slipped over Harrow's face like oil as they passed near the streetlights, then vanished again as the path wound back towards Gideon's shed. Drearburh fit poorly around them. Her sword itched on her back.

"Follow me. Don't go too far ahead or behind. Please," Harrow added again. This was more pleases than Harrow usually shelled out per decade, and that fact was the only latch on Gideon's tongue, which was building up a large and unpleasant backlog.

She followed Harrow's slow, dreadful bike down streets she didn't know about and roads she'd never seen before. Once again the world had detached from whatever held it and sat lightly around her. The sky was greying to one side as they rode between stands of aggressively tall trees. The air was warming again. At last, Gideon heard damp, quiet sounds.

They rounded a final corner to see, through a screen of young trees, a vast sea of grass cut through with water. It smelled the same way that Crux's work in Harrow's garden smelled, of rot and decay used to feed larger purposes, but a thousand times over. So many things were decomposing in this marsh that it had come through death and out the other side; it was profoundly alive. At the edge of the water was a shallow staircase made of plain, pale, dull tile, with a metal railing attached.

Gideon, who had never seen this before in her life, stopped dead in confusion for a moment. But Harrow dropped her bike and marched directly up to the edge of the water.

“The time has come,” she said, “to tell you - what I can.”

“What you can,” repeated Gideon flatly.

Harrow’s jaw was moving, as if she were chewing on her own words before she said them; after a minute, she said, “yes. Some things will harm you to know, and I swore in a binding fashion that I would not speak of them until the time comes. Until _go time,_ as you might say.”

“Will ‘harm me to know’?” Gideon repeated again, like a shitty parrot. “I don’t care if I get a paper cut on my feelings, Nonagesimus -”

“Gideon Nav,” Harrow said with the air of someone who was less than ten seconds away from screaming, “after beholding me on the night of Halloween, do you really think the only thing at stake here is your _feelings?”_

Silence sat between them. Then Harrowhark said “get in the water,” and shucked off her overrobe.

“It’s November,” Gideon said bleakly.

But it didn’t seem to matter. At her first barefooted step onto the tile, Gideon found that it was lukewarm, rather than cold. It and the air around it warmed noticeably with every foot she moved towards the water - and then she was stepping into it, gritting her teeth at its murky brown color. Harrow was next to her on the stairs. Together they moved chestfirst into the blood-warm marsh, until Harrow slipped a little and came back up sputtering, water coating her jaw, and Gideon’s feet touched unpleasantly mushy dirt.

“Why the fuck are we standing here?” she demanded to know.

“It was my mother’s tradition,” Harrow said, still chewing her words and speaking slowly, “that to speak of the secrets of the Ninth House, we were to be immersed in salt water. This is the place kept for such a purpose. I cannot tell you everything - yet - but I will tell you what I can, while we are here.”

Gideon stared at her. The paint of her jaw was starting to slide down her neck in places. Those black eyes bored into her. “Oh shit,” she said. “You’re serious.”

“Yes,” Harrow said impatiently. “Some of this you will find you already know, even if you have not quite put it together yet. On the night of Halloween, you watched me partially complete a rite of necromancy - which I cannot further elucidate to you.”

“I knew it!” Gideon shouted, and instantly felt as if she knew nothing. “So you’re- you know-” and she fluttered her fingers in a completely meaningless way.

“I don’t know what that is. Stop,” commanded Harrow. “I am not a parlor magician or some lying diviner. I am a necromancer of Drearburh, and in me lies the hope of my house.”

“What does that even _mean?”_ Gideon asked. It came out almost plaintively.

For perhaps the first time since Gideon had met her, Harrowhark Nonagesimus looked genuinely regretful. “I’m sorry that I can’t tell you. I - I do not want to keep you in the dark, Griddle. It is the worst of this that I cannot tell you what has been done here. And that I must ask you to stop looking.”

A bird shrieked over the grasses that framed them in on either side, green as far as Gideon could see, vivid green in November. “So that’s it, then,” she said tonelessly. “Here’s the mudfest where we tell each other our secrets. Magic’s real. Everything you ever spat on was true. No further questions. I’m just supposed to stop thinking about what happened to your parents, who you definitely did not murder.”

“My parents,” Harrow said, gently surprised. She looked as if she was very far away. “Oh. No. My parents killed themselves.”

“Oh,” said Gideon, more to do something with her mouth in a moment of vast and horrible panic than out of any real understanding.

“The Ninth House is a house of necromancy,” Harrow continued, “few of us though that there are. The belief of the Ninth House is as you were taught in school - that at the dawn of time, God our Emperor built the houses, and that the Ninth was built around the tomb of something he wished to contain. The knife that was waiting for him… the blade that slept. Here we, too, wait, keeping ourselves alive generation to generation, to keep the way sealed shut.”

If she had gone on to say that, actually, they were completely right and that magic existed for this purpose and that every nun Gideon had ever scorned had been right about everything, Gideon would have simply sunk herself into the water and never come out. But instead, Harrowhark’s jaw moved furiously for a full minute, and finally, she said, “the tomb in question is the one next to my family’s home. For reasons I cannot divulge, after a time, I needed to know if this was - was all worth it.

“I am very possibly the greatest necromancer that Drearburh has ever produced. I opened the door to the tomb. I spent that whole year frantically studying to make it possible - you may remember you barely saw me… and I did. Every thing our house had ever done to stop me was not enough. I was ready to roll the rock away, and to travel the tunnel I had heard described behind it… to find the island with the mausoleum… to see the coffin that holds the death of God.

“I opened the door to the tomb, and my parents exited the house at the worst possible time, and beheld it with me. Gideon, there is nothing there. There is no tunnel, no underground sea, no sarcophagus. Only stone. You were right,” Harrow said, and her voice was terrible. “You were right. It could never be worth it. All of it has been a lie.”

She paused, but there was no mercy: it was not over. “When my parents knew what I had done, they instantly knew what they would do. They called Mortus in, as my father’s cavalier, and told him, and he obeyed. And then they told me. They were very kind about it.”

“Stop,” said Gideon. Harrow stopped obediently.

The whole thing was so stupidly, bone-wrenchingly sad. Even with the power Harrow really had, everything Gideon had already known to be bullshit was revealed, in fact, to be bullshit. The Ninth House Harrow loved so much, worked so hard on, was a hollow joke. The whole town and everyone in it was trapped in a charade, the same charade they had probably played for centuries, ever since some jackass had come along and said that the big rock in this particular yard was a tomb and that God needed them to protect it. She saw, in her mind’s eye, Drearburh: and it was empty.

“Do you really want to tell me any more details?” Gideon asked.

She remained silent for long seconds. Moisture coated her face, paint streaking and falling away to reveal the skin underneath. The water trembled around her. “No,” Harrow whispered.

“Then you don’t have to,” said Gideon. “God. Augh.” Her voice was tired and funny and horrible. She could not stop thinking about Mortus the Ninth being told he was going to kill himself and going along with it. About Harrow left alone in empty, vacant, meaningless Drearburh, and all the moving parts of the Ninth inexorably winding down around her in the dark.

They sat there in the marsh, half looking at each other, half looking through each other. Finally, tiredly, Gideon said, “Harrow, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry any of this ever happened.”

Harrow snapped. In less than a quarter of a second her entire mood flipped. Fire burned in her bottomless eyes. She lunged forwards through the water - slipped on the mud - caught the collar of Gideon’s tee - tried to rend it. “Sorry!” she howled, with more lung capacity than Gideon had ever known her to have. _”You_ are sorry for _me!_ Gideon Nav, this house spins your life into bone dust! We have wasted you in every way, treated you like filth, and _hurt you!_ You were grist for our meaningless existence! You -”

Her words dissolved and lost meaning. Harrowhark coughed unwillingly, then retched - Gideon reached back out to her, grabbing her shoulders, so that they clung to each other as the sound of insects rose around them. She was a scrap of a thirteen year old screaming meaninglessly against everything their world was made up of. Paint clung to her around her eyes and forehead, but the skin of her jaw was on full display to the world. It was as easy as breathing for Gideon to haul her close, the way she would someone she had disarmed, for a killing blow with her gauntlet.

“Shhh,” Gideon said.

Harrow shhh-ed. She looked surprised at herself.

“Do you remember when we were eleven,” Gideon asked, “and you asked me if I was okay hanging out with someone like you? Weird question, by the way.”

“Yes.”

“And I told you yes.”

“You didn’t know this then,” Harrow protested. “You still don’t know it all.”

“I know enough,” Gideon said. “Are you trying to hurt me?”

“I’ve hurt you plenty! I’ve hurt you more recently than you might think!”

_”Are you trying to hurt me?”_ Gideon demanded. “Or are you trying to be my friend?”

Slowly, as if dragging the words from the bowels of the earth, Harrow whispered, “To be your friend.”

Gideon gripped her shoulders and lowered her head slowly to rest against Harrow’s. Harrow trembled briefly, all over, and shifted jerkily a little farther into Gideon, and was still.

“Then I trust you,” she said.

* * *

They sat on the edge of the stairs with their feet in the water and watched the sun rise across from them over the water. The insect life of the marsh - dragonflies, gnats, a cicada somewhere - went about their business, ignoring them. Out in the green where they couldn’t see something jumped in and out of the water, and in and out again.

“I _am_ sorry I can’t tell you all of this right now,” Harrow said quietly. When Gideon looked over, her eyes were fixed on the water, but the water in front of Gideon’s knees, not her own. “There will come a day when I can - when it becomes necessary. And then I will. Is… is that acceptable?”

“Copacetic,” Gideon said. She leaned back on her palms. “It’s okay, ominous overlord. Your secrets are safe with me.”

Harrow was silent for a moment. “Oh,” she said in a soft voice.

“What?” Gideon asked, glancing over. She wasn’t sure what that tone meant.

“No, I-” Harrow said, looked away, fell silent, and then said, “thank you, Gideon.”

“No, really,” Gideon protested. “I will.”

“I was given to understand that this was how one normally expressed gratitude,” Harrow said, a little of her biting tongue returning. “If you are waiting on my development of further social graces, you will be sorely disappointed, Griddle.”

“Oh, okay,” Gideon said, and leaned forward again. Harrow was just sort of bad at this, not being sarcastic - understandable. This wasn’t their usual fare. “No worries, I know you’re a library creature with a mean streak. It’s part of your appeal.”

She had something else to say and couldn’t quite figure out how to get there, and stupid phrases like _it’s part of your appeal_ kept drifting out of her mouth before anything useful could. So Gideon fell back on her greatest ability, which was always physical.

Slowly, purposefully, she grasped for Harrow’s hand. There was a sharp little intake of breath from beside her. But she didn’t pull away.

“Will you let me help?” Gideon asked helplessly. “Will you tell me when you need help, and let me do something about it?”

Harrow could probably have done any number of things to defuse this. She could have told Gideon _no, what do you know about running a town?_ or _leave the thinking to me, Nav, you’ll burn your brain out_ or _under no circumstances will I talk about this ever again in my entire life._ Instead her hand closed reflexive and brittle over Gideon’s, and it stayed there.

“Do you want to help me?” Harrow whispered. “Even if I have to lie to you?”

The hell with this, Gideon thought. She scooted to face Harrow’s side. Harrow looked towards her with her old mask of scorn and her deep, wary eyes, and as she did, Gideon tugged her bodily towards her.

Their arms wrapped around each other out of necessity. Harrow’s breath pushed against her bare, damp collarbone. The words drummed against her skin from the other side.

“All I ever wanted was for you to ask,” Gideon said. "Would you - ?" And then, finally, she gave up on dignity and blurted out: “One flesh, one end?”

The temperature of Harrow’s cheek against her shoulder skyrocketed. Then she nodded.

“One flesh - one end,” Harrow said, voice choked.


End file.
